'Lord of the Flies' in Kabul

At a time when security in Afghanistan is worsening and the administration is trying to shore up liberal support for the war, State Department contractors guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul are working in a “Lord of the Flies environment,” a Washington watchdog group told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday.

About 10 percent of the 150 English-speaking guards employed at the embassy by ArmorGroup, a private security company headquartered in Britain and Florida, approached the Project on Government Oversight and described “a pervasive breakdown in the chain of command and guard force discipline and morale,” according a letter sent to Clinton by executive director Danielle Brian.

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An e-mail from one of the guards described parties on days off, during which guards and their supervisors urinated on themselves and others and ate potato chips and drank vodka from the cracks of buttocks.

“You will see that they have a group of sexual predators, deviants, running rampant over there,” one guard, whose name was withheld, said in an e-mail to POGO, adding, “They are showing poor judgment.”

Pictures accompanying POGO’s letter corroborate at least some of the allegations. The e-mail and photographs were given to reporters by POGO.

“Beyond basic decency standards, the situation at Camp Sullivan is clearly in violation of [ArmorGroup’s] contract with the State Department, which specifies, ‘Each contractor employee or subcontractor employee is expected to adhere to standards of conduct that reflect credit on themselves, their employer and the United States government,’” Brian said in the letter to Clinton.

Beyond that, the breakdown in discipline and the guards’ chain of command was a serious security breach that the U.S. government needed to address, Brian said in her letter.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, on Tuesday urged the State Department to dig in with a “thorough review of the performance, management and oversight of this contract.”

If the allegations uncovered by POGO are true, they “raise questions regarding [ArmorGroup’s] performance of the contract and the department’s management and oversight,” McCaskill wrote in a letter to Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of management at State.